Marketing Monitor - Google Click Fraud and Web Analytics

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Google Click Fraud and Web Analytics
March 1, 2007

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Gord Hotchkiss recently wrote an excellent article for Media Post's SearchInsider explaining click fraud from Google’s perspective (focused on Google’s Click Fraud announcement). The article suggests that the phrase “Click Fraud” is often not used in the correct context: “For a click to be fraudulent…They have to be paying for traffic that has no value.”

Gord’s article states that less than 10% of clicks are invalid and Google places this type of traffic into a separate basket along with double clicks on ads, questionable activity from a single IP address, automated clicks, and fraudulent clicks so that the traffic is filtered as if the clicks didn’t even occur.

The most shocking part of the article was finding out that only 0.02% traffic slips through Google’s filters (which is actually fraudulent clicks), where advertisers do get inaccurately charged. Gord has a great point when he mentions that for only 0.02% of traffic, a person’s time would be better spent somewhere else such as trying to increase conversion rates. Google will be launching a Click Fraud Resource center to further help the process of tracking invalid clicks.

Where else SHOULD I spend my time?

When you’ve stopped worrying about Click Fraud there are many different places in an online campaign that you can concentrate on. Here are just a few:

Concern yourself with the performance of your landing pages. Are your landing pages engaging your visitors? Are your visitors converting? Are they clicking through to the rest of your website? Measure the success of your messaging on your landing pages by performing A/B and Multivariate testing.

Measure the ROI of your campaigns by segmenting conversions by source and keywords. This is the best way to assign your advertising spend.

Have you analyzed your competitive landscape? Who else is bidding for the same keywords and how do your ads stack up against theirs? What about your rank on Google or Yahoo? Does a rank 3 consistently deliver more ROI than a rank 2? (Have you adjusted your bidding strategies accordingly?).

Some focus in anyone of these areas can immediately help strengthen your campaign’s success.

How Can Web Analytics Help Me?

With web analytics implemented on your website it makes for a very effective way to help Google fight Click Fraud (even if it is only 0.02% of traffic). Web Analytics has the ability to track almost all activity on your website and helps pinpoint trends when your data looks somewhat inaccurate.

The web analytics company, ClickTracks has really become a leader in helping fight click fraud with the introduction of click fraud campaign analysis built directly into its analytics framework. ClickTracks analyzes campaigns which appear to have worthless/suspicious visits in order to help their client make the appeal for Click Fraud. ClickTracks doesn’t specifically identify the suspicious person or IP address because doing that doesn’t really help the client get their money back. Comparison metrics used in the analysis include:

- Number of sessions
- Revenue conversion rate
- Total cost of campaign
- Number of single page sessions
- Number of different IP addresses
- Number of clicks from a particular country
- Number of sessions with no referrer
- Number of sessions that reach any goal page

Furthermore ClickTracks creates a detailed excel report which shows a list of faulty sessions in order for users to make a case to their PPC Vendors. Data in their report includes:

- Specific Campaign ID
- Landing page with all parameters
- Date & time of visit
- Visitor Client IP address
- Country
- Referring domain
- Full referrer information
- Number of pages visited
- Total Time on site
- Revenue
- List of all pages visited with time

If what Google states is accurate then we should all make a conscious effort to invest our time where it’s most needed: analyzing how to get greater return on investment. Also, don’t ever go into a PPC campaign blind, make sure you have a strong analytics implementation in place so that you can make smarter business decisions on both ROI and potential Click Fraud.

Original Post: Web Analytics World

Manoj Jasra
Senior Web Analytics Analyst
Search Engine Positioning by Searchengineposition
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing
Blog: Web Analytics World
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